saw more clearly than Pascal the things that, as he says, are “unjust” in certain Christian dogmas, that are “shocking,” are “far-fetched,” the “absurdities”; he saw it all and accepted it all. He accepted everything or nothing. When one makes a bargain with faith, one does not pick and choose; one takes all and gives all. It was Pascal who said that atheism was a sign of strength of mind, but a strength displayed in one direction only. One might turn that round and say that Catholicism implies strength of mind, at least on one point. Protestantism, though of a higher order in the evolution of belief, remains to-day a mark of a certain weakness of mind in those who, having made the first step toward freedom of thought, rest there; it is a halt midway. At bottom, however, the two rival orthodoxies, over which nowadays civilized nations dispute, are equally astonishing to those who have passed beyond them. _III. The dissolution of dogmatic faith in modern society._ [Sidenote: Dogmatic faith distanced by science.] Can a dogmatic faith, whether narrow or broad, indefinitely coexist with modern science? We think not. Science consists of two portions: the constructive and the destructive. The constructive portion is already far enough advanced, in modern society, to provide for certain desiderata which dogma undertook formerly to supply. We have to-day, for example, more extended and detailed information about the genesis of the world than is found in the Bible. We are attaining by degrees a certain number of facts relating to the affiliation of species. And all the celestial or terrestrial phenomena which strike the eye are already completely explained. The definitive _why_ has not been given, no doubt; we even ask ourselves if there is one. But the _how_ has already been in a great part dealt with. Let us not forget that religions in the beginning took the place of physics; that physical theories constituted for a long time an essential and preponderant part of them. Nowadays physics and religion have been distinguished, and religion has lost by the separation a large part of its power, which has passed over to science. [Sidenote: And undermined.]